What can I say about Facebook, that hasn't already been said?
I have had an account there for about 3 1/2 years. I joined it well over a year before Twitter and I still use both more or less equally, but for different purposes. Facebook is very definitely my family-and-friends network. So, my CV (which ought to be online by now, but isn't, so I can't point to it here) gives my account details for Twitter and LinkedIn, but not for Facebook. And I post work-related stuff there rarely, and only when I reckon that it might be of general interest to at least some people who have no part in the biomedical, higher education or science communication communities.
Aidan, whose interest in Facebook has dwindled as his enthusiasm for Twitter has grown, posted in July 2010 that Facebook offers "play versions of things that thrive better in a full-sized version elsewhere". I can see the point of that, very clearly, but I can also see the point of play versions.
Take photography. I have one Facebook friend who is an enthusiastic and very able wildlife photographer. The majority of his photos of beasts have their home on his Flickr photostream; Facebook is where he keeps photos of his own wedding. Another keen photographer who is currently using the 365 Project to record a photo a day for a year, nevertheless mounts casual snaps taken at parties on Facebook. My own photography is very much of the "casual snap" variety, and I want my family and friends to see it; Facebook will do.
And sometimes Facebook does rather better than that. Does anyone else with accounts on both run "Facebook-Twitter races", just for fun? The idea is to pose the same query to both sites and see which comes up with the answer first. Today, I had just such a query. I'm going to a conference in Barcelona in September and find that I have a spare morning - no more - between arrival and the start of proceedings. I've never been to Barcelona before; what will I be able to see in that limited time? I posted the question on Facebook and Twitter, and waited. Facebook won hands down, with half a dozen useful suggestions within a few hours; my tweet sank without trace. Why? Well, perhaps because my Twitter network is still rather small, and quite a few of my followers are institutions. Perhaps because they had serious things on their minds (#Libya has been dominating my Twitter feed all day). Or perhaps because (so far) relatively few of my followers are librarians. Any ideas?
Monday 22 August 2011
Monday 15 August 2011
Week 7, Thing 12: Bookmarking tools (Delicious)
I start this post with a confession. I had a Delicious account before, once.
The least part-time, and longest-lived, of my several part-time jobs is as a lecturer at Birkbeck College, where I teach on an Internet based distance learning MSc course in structural biology. (You don't need to know anything about structural biology to understand this post - essentially it involves the techniques that are used to discover the three-dimensional structures of proteins and other molecules and to understand how these relate to their biological function.)
A random(-ish) protein structure
This one's myoglobin, found in red blood cells, and the first protein structure to be solved.
In 1958.
Back in 2007, I was awarded a small grant from London University's Centre for Distance Education to explore introducing various Web 2.0 based tools into that course. Some of the tools I tried worked very well. I still maintain the course blog, which manages a rather higher hit rate than this one. But Delicious... no. I set up an account, shared it with the students, and asked them to save bookmarks of structural biology research sites they liked (there are lots to choose from... like this one...) But I don't think a single link was saved. Maybe I should have set it as an assessed exercise.
Maybe, also, I should have set up my own Delicious account before I started using it in teaching. At that time, I couldn't think of anything I, personally, would want to do with delicious (or any other social bookmarking tool) that I couldn't do with my browser's memory and Google. I'm still not quite sure. Two things, however, have encouraged me to give this another go. The first, obviously enough, is this course. The second is reading David Weinberger's excellent book Everything is Miscellaneous, or "the power of the new digital disorder". Published in 2007, this book says nothing about Facebook or Twitter at all, but it allots five index entries, some multi-page, to the power of Delicious. The site's creator, Joshua Schachter, is quoted there as describing it as an "amplification system for your memory of websites".
So, four years and (at least) one change of ownership for Delicious later, I now have an account again. And, so far, about a dozen bookmarks with associated tags. My user name is the same as my Twitter username: Clare_Sansom.
The least part-time, and longest-lived, of my several part-time jobs is as a lecturer at Birkbeck College, where I teach on an Internet based distance learning MSc course in structural biology. (You don't need to know anything about structural biology to understand this post - essentially it involves the techniques that are used to discover the three-dimensional structures of proteins and other molecules and to understand how these relate to their biological function.)
A random(-ish) protein structure
This one's myoglobin, found in red blood cells, and the first protein structure to be solved.
In 1958.
Back in 2007, I was awarded a small grant from London University's Centre for Distance Education to explore introducing various Web 2.0 based tools into that course. Some of the tools I tried worked very well. I still maintain the course blog, which manages a rather higher hit rate than this one. But Delicious... no. I set up an account, shared it with the students, and asked them to save bookmarks of structural biology research sites they liked (there are lots to choose from... like this one...) But I don't think a single link was saved. Maybe I should have set it as an assessed exercise.
Maybe, also, I should have set up my own Delicious account before I started using it in teaching. At that time, I couldn't think of anything I, personally, would want to do with delicious (or any other social bookmarking tool) that I couldn't do with my browser's memory and Google. I'm still not quite sure. Two things, however, have encouraged me to give this another go. The first, obviously enough, is this course. The second is reading David Weinberger's excellent book Everything is Miscellaneous, or "the power of the new digital disorder". Published in 2007, this book says nothing about Facebook or Twitter at all, but it allots five index entries, some multi-page, to the power of Delicious. The site's creator, Joshua Schachter, is quoted there as describing it as an "amplification system for your memory of websites".
So, four years and (at least) one change of ownership for Delicious later, I now have an account again. And, so far, about a dozen bookmarks with associated tags. My user name is the same as my Twitter username: Clare_Sansom.
A few bookmarks
I'm still not sure exactly what I will come to use Delicious for, or how much use it will be to me in my professional life, but I'm finding it rather fun to explore.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)